Takashi Nakamoto yells a friendly greeting from the kitchen when he spots a customer slide open the door to his restaurant, his face just visible through the steam rising from pots of stock and boiling water. As he slices leeks and shakes the residu...
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Even as Carlos Ghosn sits alone in a tiny cell, with just 30 minutes of daily exercise to break the monotony of detention, Japan has found it hard to muster a shred of sympathy for a man hailed as a colossus of the global car industry until his rapi...
A TV network in Japan has cancelled an appearance by the popular K-pop band BTS, after a photo emerged of one of its members wearing a T-shirt that appeared to celebrate the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The seven-member boy band, who have built a hu...
Standing on a platform as a bullet train hurtles past at top speed can be an unnerving experience. Spare a thought, then, for the dozens of new employees of West Japan Railway forced to squat in a trough between two sets of tracks as shinkansen trai...
More than 26,000 of the world’s species are now threatened, according to the latest red list assessment of the natural world, adding to fears the planet is entering a sixth wave of extinctions. New research, particularly in Australia, has widened th...
Who was there? The G7 is attended by the leaders of the seven main western economies, and has been seen as a chance for world leaders to discuss the chief diplomatic and economic issues of the day. Leaders from the US, France, Canada, Germany Japan,...
Besieged by cronyism scandals that have prompted speculation he will be out of office by early summer, Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, will arrive in the US for talks with Donald Trump this week with a potential foreign policy headache to add to...
Women who rushed to the aid of a man suffering a stroke while giving a speech at a sumo event in Japan were ordered off the raised ring due to rules banning females from the sacred space. The 66-year-old mayor of Maizuru city, Ryozo Tatami, collapse...
Junko Iizuka* was 16 when she was taken to a clinic in north-east Japan and forced to have a mystery operation that, she later discovered, would prevent her from ever having children. “I was given anaesthetic and I didn’t remember anything after tha...
Sometimes a play grips because of its subject. Such is the case with this new piece by Francis Turnly which, although dramaturgically conventional, opens up the story of the abduction by North Korea of young Japanese citizens. Documentaries and movi...
Japan is believed to be preparing to execute as many as 13 members of a doomsday cult in what could become the country’s biggest round of hangings in the past decade. Tuesday marked the 23rd anniversary of Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin nerve gas attack on t...
For 30 years, Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama has probed the intimate lives of cities – from the quarries where they are blasted from the rock to the secret subterranean rivers that sustain them Words by Yasufumi Nakamori, Toyo Ito and Phili...